The Collective Quotes
"My thoughts start spinning along with the wheels, memories of road trips, of carpools and radio sing-alongs and petty arguments, and before I know it, I’m aiming straight for the divider."
"I pass a group of young women smoking last-minute cigarettes—friends of his, maybe?—and I think back to the time I caught Emily smoking weed with her friend Fiona."
"The noise especially. I just shared a subway car with a group of high school girls, and their laughter still swirls in my ears."
"I’m not always this way. That is to say, nine-tenths of the time I’m calm and cool and going about my business."
"But Emily is always on my mind, a ragged bundle of memories, cocooned in a constant, gnawing pain."
"Because you’re my mommy. Because it’s your job to keep me okay."
"The recipient of the Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award this year is a young man who exemplifies public service."
"I had some drinks to calm my nerves. They didn’t mix well with my antianxiety meds, which... I guess is kind of ironic, really."
"It’s the price you pay for being dumb enough to feel secure in your life."
"VIDEO LINKS ARE one thing, but GIFs last forever."
"If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever."
"Our friends, on the other hand, kept trying to put me to bed. 'Get some sleep. You need your strength.' People always tell the grieving to get some rest, take it easy, go to sleep."
"The only words that aren’t tolerated here are the ones forced on us by those who aren’t part of the mountain—'Moving on,' 'learning to forgive,' 'a newfound understanding,' etc."
"I’d never tell the story without being judged for it, and so I’ve promised myself that I’ll never tell it again."
"My fantasies of wish fulfillment do not involve Emily at all. They involve Harris Blanchard, paying for what he’s done."
"The stories we tell in the Kaya chat, though, are different. They’re possible. And the more we put them into words that aren’t judged or shot down or excused away with You don’t really feel like that, honey . . . the more we agree with those words and elaborate on them and give each other respect for having typed them, the closer our stories get to feeling not just possible, but probable. Achievable."
"The sun is starting to rise, and I still haven’t slept. I pop a Xanax. Set the alarm on my phone for nine a.m. so I don’t miss my meeting with penny-pinching Glynne. As I fall asleep, I feel strange. I realize that it’s because for the first time in months, I’m smiling."
"Am I that hard to understand? Or is it just that they don’t want to understand me, people like Glynne Barrett, who curate their wardrobes and fuss over websites and run from anything raw and unplanned, as though my type of pain were catching?"
"It will lose its magic. As though we are witches, casting spells on our enemies."
"I don’t just want him killed off. I want his soul destroyed, his memory ripped to shreds, just like he and his family and their lawyers did to my daughter. After he’s dead, I want the whole world to see him for what he truly was. I want his parents to have to live for the rest of their lives knowing what a mistake it was to bring him into the world."
"People do and say and think whatever they can, just so they can believe they’re good. It isn’t my job to back them up."
"I want him dead. For real. I don’t care how."
"Each one of us is a working part in a great machine. The machine that we are produces justice."
"My daughter—the lack of her—is the last thing on his mind."
"There’s safety in numbers, yes. But more important, there is power."
"Don't diverge from the rules. Don't ever, never again."
"The collective targets no one who doesn’t deserve to be targeted."
"They believe what their defense lawyers say about them. They need to be punished to feel guilt, and then they’re never punished, so they never do."
"You can feel it in their eyes, and all over their faces as they’re begging and pleading."
"We suffer and we weep and they don’t care. They never learn. They never understand. Not until their last sentient moments on this earth. Then they get it. All of it."
"They need to be punished to feel guilt, and then they’re never punished, so they never do."
"I want to ask her if she minds keeping quiet as much as I do, but from the looks of her, she doesn’t."
"In synch, I think. A well-oiled and silent machine."
"I’m not sure I’ve ever liked someone so much after exchanging so few words with them."
"It’s close to midnight, and we’re heading north on Route 9, as per the second text on Wendy’s flip phone."
"And while we have indeed broken a rule, it feels like it’s for the better good."
"Instagram fame, she snorts. I’m sixty-five, for godsakes."
"I’ve been doing it since Emily was alive, glossing up the cookie-baking, keyboard-playing honors student part of her and locking away the other parts."
"When you’ve been through fire, you can’t feel that burn every day. You have to go on with your life."
"It’s so hard, though, to care about website design when, three days ago, I got rid of the person who made 2223 wake up every day with her gut tied up in knots."
"I wish there was some way I could let her know that he’s at the bottom of a lake. Not missing at all."
"Gary Kimball isn’t missing." She spits out the words. "He escaped. And his wife’s in on it."
"There’s no way she didn’t know about the civil case when she gave Wendy and me the assignment."
"Some rules can be broken, can’t they? Look at how much it helped us to talk."
"This was like a really good one-night stand, only without the sex."
"I’m going to be honest with you," I tell him. "I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel."
"What does that make us? It makes us monsters."
"None of these monsters are evil. It’s the evil of others that makes them powerful."
"They’re calling him a rapist. They’re saying ‘Justice for Emily’ again."
"I wouldn’t wish it on any mother. Including Harris Blanchard’s."
"Everything changes, and anything can end on a dime."
"There's a weight to having a destination and a purpose, even if that purpose is saying hi to a stranger as he's leaving a cemetery. It tethers me, the way being a mother used to. It makes me feel as though I'm part of something more important than myself."
"Just like heaven," I whisper, my pulse quickening, that gorgeous bloodshot sky above me, the thruway entrance so close, I can nearly read the signs."
"I survive," I tell Luke, "because I have a friend who's worth living for."
"I’ve never lied to Luke before. I don’t know if I’ll be able."
"He killed a woman’s daughter and got away with it. This is what needed to happen."
"You’re a mind reader," he says. "Grady and I were just talking about you."
"I think of that woman on our page, a sister. My sister, her daughter killed by this plastic surgeon’s carelessness—a cruel, callous man, she said, who had never apologized, never paid. Her daughter gone forever."
"There may be both safety and power in numbers, but safety and power do not equal insight."
"We gain strength from our weaknesses. Unless they are the type of weakness that cannot be forgiven."
"I feel exhausted. Drained. She makes sense. She always does. But why should I believe someone who has been watching me without my knowledge?"
"Nothing’s guaranteed—not future plans or justice or love or goodwill or the integrity of groups to whom you swear your allegiance. Not the good guys winning or the truth prevailing and certainly not life, the least guaranteed thing of all."
"People change. Kids grow up. Life tosses them around and wears them down and sometimes they learn from it and don’t need to be punished any more than they’ve already punished themselves."
"There’s something almost welcoming about the normalcy of a speeding ticket."
"Do exactly as I say. Place your hands on the left rear bumper. Wide stance. Legs three feet apart."
"I feel her gloved hands at my neck, my shoulders, down the length of my back, around my waist."
"Do something. Arrest me. Read me my fucking rights."
"We know what you were," she says. "We know what you are."
"The thing with the truth, it hides in plain sight."
"I DON’T WANT TO SHARE FEELINGS ABOUT HIM. I WANT HIM TO FUCKING DIE."
"You beg and you plead and you bargain. Please let her live. I’ll be a better person, I promise. . . ."
"Boredom creeps up on you slowly, wraps its tendrils around you and tugs at you in such a subtle yet constant way, you’ll do anything to escape it."
"The love of a good friend. That’s what’s helped me most."